There’s a simple reason why UGC works so well: We, as consumers, will connect more with an individual telling us that they had a great experience than with a business trying to convince us that we will have a great one. The real experience, and the fact that an individual is telling us about it, touches us more than anything else.
But first, a little about the significant benefits of UGC:
First, UGC offers our potential customers an authentic “peek” into the experience that the business is selling. In the example of the guesthouse, you can see and hear about the hospitality experience from the guest’s own perspective: about the room that suited their needs, the food that the whole family loved, the accessibility, and the attractions they did during their stay.
Another significant advantage is the cost of such content. There is a very wide range of prices for this type of collaboration, depending on the type of content creator and the message they want to convey, and you can also customize the product according to the creator.
Sometimes the acceptance of the product itself can also be the payment. But the interesting thing is that sometimes the best results do not necessarily stem from the size of the budget – the authenticity of the content is the most significant thing.
As a guesthouse, the obvious thing to do is to collaborate with travel and tourism bloggers, and that’s what we do. But alongside that, we decided to try something different to freshen up the visibility a bit and diversify the audience of the familiar travel content. The thought was: “Why not try bringing in unexpected bloggers?”
We began to integrate collaborations with content creators from unconventional fields such as education, fitness, and cooking, and we were surprised to see how well it worked. While there were also influencers who didn’t want to “break” their usual type of content, those who did came created very high engagement and lively traffic on social media pages. We discovered that through these collaborations we increase the authenticity of the content and also the amount of audience we reach. We realized that the content feels very natural to the guesthouse’s and the creators’ followers, and sometimes a single video created with content that is seemingly unrelated to the guesthouse’s field generates more traffic for the guesthouse than a video created with content that deals solely with tourism and recreation.
Sometimes it’s worth trying to find ways to diversify our usual activities. Combining unexpected content can lead to surprising results!